Black Power first grew and flourished in the United States, but it came to envelop much of the world.

For a decade after 1967, the specter of Black Power terrified officials at the highest levels of the British state. Cabinet ministers and senior civil servants feared that black radicals, along with the Irish Republican Army, the Angry Brigade, and increasingly militant unions, might be strong enough to bring down Her Majesty’s government.

London once sat at the center of a slave-trading empire, which, after abolition, imposed colonial rule over much of Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. A movement determined to resist “White Power” didn’t struggle to find support in the nation’s capital.